System for detecting symptoms, determining staging and gauging drug efficacy in cases of Alzheimer's disease

Abstract

A system for using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for detecting symptoms indicative of Alzheimer's disease, diagnosing Alzheimer's disease and gauging the efficacy of medications used in treating Alzheimer's disease. The system includes steps involving activating a selected region of the brain which may be affected by Alzheimer's disease using an identity recognition type task, concurrently acquiring task-active MRI data responsive to the task, comparing the patient's task-active MRI data to reference data derived from a database of task-active data from healthy individuals and detecting whether the patient has symptoms related to Alzheimer's disease. The severity of the patient's symptoms and the staging of the disease may also be determined. Also, a medication may be administered to the patient and the efficacy of the medication may be gauged based on the severity of the patient's symptoms.

Description

FIELD OF THE INVENTION [0001] The present invention relates to systems for use in detecting symptoms of neurodegenerative disorders and more specifically to using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for detecting symptoms, staging and gauging drug efficacy in cases of Alzheimer's disease. BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0002] Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia and is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder resulting in gradual deterioration in cognition, function, and behavior. Approximately 2-4 million individuals in the US and more than 30 million worldwide are affected. Age is an important risk factor with AD occurring in 8% of individuals over 65 and 30% over age 85. The progression of AD is gradual with the average patient living 8-10 years after symptom onset. The prevalence of AD is expected to triple over the next 50 years in developed countries. The annual cost of the disease in the United States alone is estimated to be $100 billion. Patho...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0012] It is a further object of the present invention to provide a system for accurately diagnosing Alzheimer's disease and assessing the staging of the disease using fMRI technology.

[0013] a yet further object of the present invention to provide a system for detecting the early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease in an efficient, consistent and reliable manner.

Problems solved by technology

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia and is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder resulting in gradual deterioration in cognition, function, and behavior.

A delay in onset can result in a 50% decrease in prevalence and a delay of 10 years would result in a disappearance of the disease.

Presently, identification of “at-risk” individuals typically relies on age, family history, clinical testing, laboratory tests, and genetic screening that are laborious, expensive and unreliable.

However, it is currently not possible to discriminate which MCI subjects will develop a progressive dementia from those who will not.

However, PET has limited spatial and temporal resolution and relies on measuring global indices of resting brain activity which are not specific to the brain systems (e.g., memory) most vulnerable to disruption at the earliest stages of neurodegeneration.

This presents safety limitations in the number of studies that can be administered to a given patient over a short period of a time, thereby limiting its ability to monitor drug efficacy.

PET also requires the on-site or nearby installation and maintenance of a cyclotron (due to the short half life of radioisotopes used to measure cerebral blood flow), thus generally limiting the installed base of available machines to a small number of academic medical centers.

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